Caves of Qud Review

hey hey people seth here have you ever dug too deep and found something they don't want you to know sandy loam who is she and why can't i reach her have you ever fallen out with someone and restored your friendship using quantum entanglement to retroactively rewrite history and save them from a car crash that never actually happened have you ever wanted to skip a lifetime of formal education just by cooking a banana and finally have you ever had a fungal infection on your arm that despite your best efforts won't go away no problem just cut it off then stab a syringe filled with anabolic growth hormones right into your chest and grow a new one as you well know mushrooms are a great source of protein i just hope you're not picky about the origin of that protein everything said could be described as the raving of a paranoid schizophrenic but it isn't it's an everyday occurrence in the caves of quote which i'm not sure how to say so we'll just use the acronym instead [ __ ] is like the negligent supervisor to a kindergarten day care when the kids ask him if they can collectively mutilate themselves in the sandbox he doesn't say no don't do that he says give it a try see what happens caves of quad is an open-ended sandbox roguelike which is still in development despite this it's entirely playable and extremely fun fun which i define as i spent half a day with my screen looking like this and i had to kill a man for his tattoo gun so i could drink the ink pull the cord on a flashbang and explode it into my open eyes why because in this game that's how you cure monochromia if pain and suffering are the extra edge to your enjoyment you're gonna have a great time if you're asking yourself right now seth what the [ __ ] am i looking at it might not be your cup of tea but i don't drink tea because they tampered my water supply and ever since i started drinking from a public tap i've been getting more and more of these androgynous body pillows let's be real here caves of quote caves of could [ __ ] is not the prettiest of games this is probably the only game you could get caught playing in the office and have your boss look at the screen and think damn my man's excel spreadsheet looks [ __ ] up it's not a very visual game even though there are some nice visuals here and there you're gonna have to use imagination and if you can't take my word for it that this random collection of pixels is actually a small farming community so what's the story of quote i don't know there used to be an advanced transhumanist civilization living on quote but they're not around anymore instead we got mutated everything from humans to trees from pigs to chimpanzees everything thinks feels and the plants talk behind your back welcome to quad it's a complete madhouse but hey it's very colorful to play this stupid game you need to make a character for which you've got two options mutant or true kin what's the difference mutants are genetic freaks and they randomly mutate their genome as they level up which includes but not limited to multiple heads multiple feet multiple hands two hearts paralyzing stingers regrowing limbs the ability to fly the ability to induce a brain aneurysm spontaneous combustion teleportation phasing through solid objects and even infinite nutrition from the sun because your skin is made of chlorophyll so what's the downside you're a horrific abomination and if you encounter a certain holy inquisition of turbo augmented race purists they'll kill you on sight conversely true to the name true kin are humans that haven't mutated they don't get mutations they get cybernetic augmentations these don't come cheap you first need to obtain an implant whether by chance or by cutting the electronics out of a dead templar then you need to find an autonomous upgrade terminal which upon detecting that you are indeed a pure blooded human refers to you as aristocrat and allows you to install as many implants as you want provided your body has space and provided you did not forget to upgrade your cybernetic software license because even if a world is over we cannot forget the importance of arbitrary bureaucratic administration and by god you're going to follow strict hr protocol to get your transhumanist upgrades every registered cybernetic in your body runs a license cost the total cannot exceed the license which you have to upgrade using cybernetic credits these are exceptionally rare and there's no easy way of finding them and rightly so because cybernetics are absolutely ridiculous tired of your tiny feminine hands giant hands afraid of dying onboard intravenous ai-controlled injectors designed to pump you full of life-saving chemicals depending on the situation you want to fabricate narcotics in the middle of combat we can install fingers on top of your fingers and if you ever change your mind you can swap them out for something else however amputating your legs to replace them with a set of motorized tank treads is unfortunately an irreversible process personally i recommend you play a mutant when starting out there's not really any bad choices in character creation but realistically don't get too attached to your first dozen once you're more confident you can play true kin instead and abuse the system so hard you'll forget the original purpose of this game attributes are simple combat is even simpler which is convenient because fighting is the main way to level up you're going to be doing a lot of fighting and death is an ever-present reality especially at lower levels if i'm going to be very honest with you most of you will reach red rock for one of the early quests and get stoned to death by a pack of bloodthirsty baboons my advice get a gun there's a lot of dangers out there but bullets don't discriminate they only penetrate this game is all about risk management and there's no telling what you're going to encounter because nearly everything is randomly generated and unique to your save file the settlements the cultures the lore the layouts of dungeons and dwellings across the world and even the pharmacological treatment for different types of disease are built completely out of rng amazingly it actually works most of the time the only things that stay the same are the location of unique settlements the topography of a map and of course the main quest line caves of quote is quite unique in this regard since most roguelikes don't have an overarching story it's currently unfinished so consider it entirely optional if you're looking to follow an objective and possibly probably most likely die in a process if it makes you feel any better most players get to golgotha and then they quit in my case i got the golgotha came back and then i realized that wasn't the hard part what did he mean by this i'm not gonna tell you you're gonna have to experience that for yourself i'm not joking when i say this game has one of the steepest difficulty curves and one fatal mistake could end your entire playthrough or you know just hit alt f4 and uh never tell anyone let me tell you about mechanics firstly overlay ui turn it on i have no idea why it's not the default but it's virtually unplayable without it there's a lot of interesting monster designs in this game interesting in their design to creatively reduce your life expectancy most common cause of death a brick wall because for some reason mimics are level 25 and still generate where they shouldn't that's good programming just like choosing unity to be the basis of your sandbox roguelike how about rusty sawblade that dismembers on every hit i hope you have an extra head because otherwise it's game over on the bright side equipping your severed faces a homemade facial accessory is both fashionable and attractive do you like bananas how about being peeled like a banana because for about half a banana trees in this game the fruit comes to them this may surprise newer players as pressing auto explore in the banana grove is a guaranteed single click shortcut to being disemboweled have you ever wondered about the struggle of living with dyslexia if so encounter a psychic master in his slaves and you won't have to wonder anymore and why not say [ __ ] it let's add a giant magnet to the game because stripping you of your dignity is no longer enough we're going to forcibly strip you of your items as well and considering most people have auto pickup turned on by default watch as your character is forced into an infinite dance of losing items picking them up only to lose them again until you starve to death or smash escape fast enough to turn it off you know the great pyramids of egypt imagine they could fly now imagine you fused it with a sherman t-34 callape and expanded the rocket tubes to a hundred not too bad when you consider a rocket salvo is only 10 unless they get you up against the wall in which case you get slammed repeatedly until they empty the entire rack and then they fabricate and replace each and every high explosive missile in a single turn at this point why not give it an automatic force field and the ability to randomly teleport across the map everything described as an enemy inside caves of quote is it a unique optional boss fight no it is a common occurrence in the deaf lands known only as a chrome pyramid and if you see your screen vibrating and glitching it's a good time to leave if that sounds overwhelming let me assure you that's not the case because every creature in this game from birds to trees plants to ants baboons to raccoons everything belongs to a specific faction and their relation to you is dependent on your reputation with a group if you're hated even the peaceful ones will try to rip you apart if you're loved even the most aggressive members will protect you as one of their own this applies to others as well chimps eat the [ __ ] out of monkeys and the relation between factions controls their behavior let's say you wear a beaded bracelet this tricks baboons into thinking you're one of their own that doesn't mean they're not aggressive that just means they're not aggressive to you they hunt they hunt monkeys they corral the men it's the most ruthless [ __ ] because there's video of this champ eating a monkey while it's alive it's holding onto the monkey and biting its hips and just pulling chunks of meat while the monkey's screaming like so how do you influence reputation reputation isn't affected by helping or killing normal people only celebrities much like real life if you kill a lot of short people they won't rise up against you but if you kill a famous minecraft youtuber the size of a small child they'll start to notice every faction randomly generates legendary characters and interacting bonding or straight up murdering them will influence your reputation depending on that character's personal history for example this is [Music] a legendary baboon queen she is naturally loved by her people however she accidentally dug up some robot's dead grandfather probably a ti-84 calculator she also sold confidential banking details from one village and stole some [ __ ] from another quite understandably these factions don't like her and smacking her dead with a heavy branch would probably make a lot of people excluding those that use [ __ ] as a projectile incredibly happy now the most precious resource in quote is water there's not much of it around so the act of sharing your water is one of the most culturally significant actions you can take your first is mine my water is yours performing a water ritual will bond you together and strengthen relations the factions that like them will like you even more but the factions that don't will dislike you by association however sharing water with another only later to betray your brother is the worst crime you can possibly commit and even the enemy of thy enemy will regard you the kinslayer with open hatred as will every faction in the game of course you can always use a schrodinger's page remember it's not considered historical revision when you're doing it with quantum entanglement as briefly mentioned water is the most valuable commodity that's why we don't have currency water is currency we don't go buy greenback or gold we go by water and we trade it by the dram one gram of water is approximately 1 8 of a fluid ounce or about 3.6 ml it is the smallest unit of trade and a water skin can hold up to 64 grams of fluid 8 fluid ounces or about 230 ml in caves of quote we drink our currency in this world poverty isn't begging on the streets poverty is dying a first and so you need water to live or trade meaning your currency is actually damn heavy and there's only so many water skins you can carry around it's an interesting system effectively forcing you to trade valuables for other valuables and measure out water to even out the difference but to even earn your water you're going to have to go into the great unknown explore plunder and pillage your way across the world and hopefully you can come back alive it's going to be dangerous but when the alternative is certain death i think i'll take my options survival is not easy but the game offers you a diverse variety of skills to help you stay alive each time you level up you get skill points which can be freely distributed to suit your character finding combinations that work is a matter of experimentation for example i once made a mutant with six arms with an axe in each hand axes specialize in dismemberment and dual welding specializes in attacking simultaneously with each arm each turn my abomination took off up to six limbs including the head and believe me everything eventually runs out of limbs on top of that you'll run into items you don't understand these will be described as an artifact and require successful identification to properly use for example if your character is a complete ass he has no concept of a folding chair instead he'll see it as a collection of strange tubes also don't do this with stuff you don't own because in the process of delicately smashing it to pieces you might unintentionally break it and the excuse of sorry i was just identifying doesn't work when you're being violently murdered by a pack of villagers artifacts are amazing and offer you great flexibility often augmenting or replacing abilities you don't have with their mechanized technological equivalent these include but are not limited to instant teleportation to any xyz coordinate biodynamic fuel cells powered by blood handheld nuclear grenades or even a pair of rocket skates designed for their intended purpose to burn down every forest in the game not only can you use them but with a tinkering skill you can also craft them and provided you've got the appropriate blueprints you can not only craft them but also modify them to your heart's content and for the longest time that seemed like the limits of this game until i went further beyond and discovered cooking imagine living in a world where the difference between life and death is decided almost entirely by what you had for breakfast that day because that's what cooking is to caves of quote when everything is so mutated even consuming the mutant will give you their properties and adding more mutants to the dish will increase the possibilities of your ridiculous combination for example i can engineer a chance to heal to full health on any tick of damage then i pour acid on my feet and become immortal or i can use a mental mutation to spawn a huge number of plants that explode when you step on them eat a gecko that gives me complete immunity to fire and intentionally cause a chain reaction that turns the entire map into lava while leaving myself untouched or i could ask a gigantic sewer slug for his favorite soup recipe drink it and turn myself permanently into a gigantic sewer slug that stores pressurizes and spits entire rivers of acid with all that knowledge the only thing left is to go deeper many people go into caves and they don't come back usually they have stupid names like nutty putty cave a man actually died there there's a mother out there that had to explain to her kids yeah your father unfortunately passed away in a nutty putty cave do you want that to be you but i digress because everything i've told you up until now has been the surface of quote what does that mean it means i've played long enough to see the game for what it really is a series of challenges that appear impossible until you realize every problem has a solution and once the puzzle pieces click together you'll reach that epiphany that the entire system is by design designed to be subverted the sandbox wants you to break it it wants you to achieve your goal in the most creative way possible let me tell you about the real caves of quote for a start we need a lot of money we don't have time to earn it so we're going to print it welcome to the lava economy because lava is extremely valuable one dram equals 16 grams of water okay great however we can only store it safely inside a one dram glass file a water skin holds 64 but starts burning the moment you put it in previously i could extinguish the fire caused by the lava by pouring water on it and leaving the water skin perfectly intact for me to sell the developers patched this out and reduced the value of lava twice but that didn't stop me instead i streamlined the process normally fungal colonies produce lava which is a good source of early money and parasitic infections but their capacity is limited we need industrial quantities you need to find and identify a thermal grenade and a freeze grenade any generation works but a mark free is preferable next we need bananas either six days stilt or banana grove preserve it into sun-dried bananas cook it gain psychometry use psychometry to read the early history of every artifact in your inventory without paying for a data disk ever again get tinkering to level one so you can disassemble scrap and craft grenades go to the desert canyon locate a nice pocket of shale rock quick trivia what's the melting point of shale rock about a thousand degrees chuck herbal grenades in quick succession until it melts congratulations we've just made lava fill as many water skins as you can hold and throw them far away now refrigerate them congratulations you have now freeze-dried your lava head back to town and buy whatever you want with the federal reserve forever printing lava we don't have to worry about money anymore next we need to metagame harder liquids are important to this game liquids are vital liquids also mix together and get tainted in the process would you like it if a woman stepped in your bowl of cereal don't answer that at the six days stilt there's a merchant of interest he sells liquids sometimes exceptionally rare liquids he's going to be the catalyst to our success but there's one problem he's only one man we need more have a look at my game now let's read the names together icker merchant clone of an icker merchant clone of a clone of an anchor merchant you get the idea we're going to buy his clothing solution pour it on his body and watch him multiply and then we're going to buy cloning solution from his clones to multiply them as well why so we can buy more cloning solution to duplicate any merchant we desire it takes some time but first you have to plant your crops before you can enjoy the harvest now we're going to buy our way to immortality how by purchasing every file of neutron flux and then you're going to cook some gravity neutron flux gives you a permanent plus one to your armor value with a one in four chance of gravitational collapse seth i don't like those odds neither do i take a sphinx salt injector stab it into your arm start cooking if your body collapses under the weight of a neutron star go back because that never really happened because precognition is a vision of a future not the present and if you don't like that theoretical timeline you go back to a divergent point in time when you first injected that cocktail walk around live life and try again when the deterministic dice roll of rng will give you the outcome you desire yes this game has saves coming built into the mechanics reach immortality keep eating bananas the potassium is good for you and good for your newfound ability to craft nearly every item in the game next the one and only reason i play truekin is to pacify the templars unique templars carry a very special cocktail unfortunately they're extremely trigger-happy and they have a tendency to inject it upon any sign of conflict as a true kin i simply walk up to them and buy it for a pathetic sum of money what is it it's an injector filled with eater nectar injecting it gives you a permanent plus one to a random attribute but that's not good enough we're going to preserve it and condense the nectar and then we're going to use precognition and cook it which gives us a one in four chance of getting plus one in all of our attributes permanently however these are quite rare and i can't know if i'll ever find another so first i find a high level merchant clone them repeatedly and buy metamorphic polygel this is cloning solution for items so now i can theoretically scale my character to an infinite amount of armor infinite amount of attributes and once i clone all the bookstores an infinite amount of schrodinger's pages that i can use to gain an infinite amount of reputation and still i get one shot by a [ __ ] rusty saw remember that chrome pyramid i talked about previously nobody actually knew how to deal with these until one insane madman emp the force field charged the chrome pyramid and with a small flick of a blade disarmed it yes he ripped off the entire swarm rack that same swarm rack can be picked up and used however the average player can only hold a weight of about 300 this thing weighs 1500 so we modify it reducing its total weight down to zero but at this point weight doesn't really matter with the exact same method i disarmed every other robot in the death lands and used them to craft spheres of negative weight allowing us to effectively role play as a high-speed missile launcher but even that was still not enough i was tired of paying for goods so i stabbed a merchant with a love injector and robbed them blind then i stabbed a legendary bear so we could improve human race relations by sharing honey and the location of local beehives i also stabbed the pope made him follow me back to town and watched as he started a race riot because his reputation with the unwashed masses was not very high instead i wanted companions that don't murder everyone so i sprayed sentience on a block of concrete and convinced the block of animated concrete to follow me into combat i found out concrete is not only indestructible it can also hold weaponry in its hands unfortunately my companion died when i foolishly tried to slam through concrete using concrete i broke a concrete wall i lost a concrete friend but none of what i said even holds a candle compared to being a high level esper here's some examples of what you can do surround yourself with a permanent force field use instant transmission turn walls into lava turn brains into liquid using your mind from the other side of a map with clairvoyance dominate every merchant to give you their life savings dominate a domesticated pig put a nuclear warhead in its mouth and turn it into a remote controlled suicide bomber split yourself into seven identical copies with identical powers and turn the screen into a living nightmare use ego projection project your hp so high it doesn't even render in the ui die anyway reverse the outcome with precognition follow one of the billion divergent timelines instead tap the mass mind pluck sentience from the universe reset your cooldowns and do it all over again as you can probably tell it was so damn powerful that the developers had to code in their own countermeasures now the more powerful you are the more others start to notice your psychic glibber increases and other espers will come to take your mind for their own the attacks become so brutal the burden of power so great that you might even be tempted in your moment of weakness to eat a [ __ ] ton of humble pies because in this game the bakeries are owned by nietzsche and his pastries induce ego death but the player will forever subvert the developer do you know how to end the pursuit to stop the hunt to escape you have to accept first that there is no escape and allow yourself to be caught and in the briefest of moments you dominate your pursuer and kill yourself your old flesh is gone but inside new flesh your mind lives on this game is truly exceptional but it does have its problems one it's made on unity that's not immediately noticeable but when a small cloud of gas accidentally falls down a pipe and has to generate 10 levels of dungeon for the sake of simulation yeah you're gonna notice two sometimes an essential quest npc contracts a fungal infection and is regrettably chopped the pieces sometimes the sandbox breaks and you lose your progress the game practically expects you to use console commands to fix itself so don't feel too bad about it free most of the game is randomly generated but you can tell immediately if a character is pre-written because the first tumblr fursona you meet will give you an option to ask about her neon purple hair and quirky way of talking i like the writing in this game but come on disliked by the water barons for her queer appearance really maybe she just looks like [ __ ] listen i can respect the fact that you can self-insert your oc girlfriend but at least give us the option of dismembering her and four i want more there's not enough of this world and you're spending too much of your time banning me off your discord for making reasonable gameplay suggestions initially i dismiss this game as overly simplistic i come back now to tell you how deep it goes even with a time given i've only told you a fraction of what i know it should be noted that the writing in this game is fantastic there's so much lore like how the banana ranchers in this game are plants themselves it's plants enslaving plants it's plantation owners beating other plantation owners they just work up the hierarchy it's like my slave name used to be whipped cream now i'm whipping cream the music in this game is very charming and sets the tone that you're in a completely alien environment where nearly every rock tree and flower is very much alive it's a beautiful wonderful and janky mess of a game and despite being in early access it's already given me hundreds of hours of enjoyment as such i give it a completely random yet quantifiably high score which can only be expressed on a graphical calculator it's fantastic it's not for everyone and it's incredibly neurotic but if that sounds like something you'd enjoy give it a try we negotiated a deal however small for about 10 off for the next couple of days on gog follow the link and you save a single dollar as always more content to come so stay tuned that content will consist of more than 4 pixels a warm thanks to the many members of a merchant's guild generously funding and bankrolling these videos except this one is completely free because i can't make you pay money for abstract text adventures you're all truly wonderful take care and have a good one

Channel: SsethTzeentach

Views: 3,793,246

Keywords: caves of qud, review, ssethtzeentach

Id: o_PBfLbd3zw

Length: 26min 48sec (1608 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/mewacketergi2]

This cracked me up: "Damn, my man's excel spreadsheet looks fucked-up."

[u/AlphaTerripan]

You know, this actually the first game that I've owned before Sseth reviewed it

[u/Zizara42]

Is this how it feel? For Sseth to review the hidden gem that you knew about and have been playing all along? Great.

[u/[deleted]]

Well, at least CoQ is single player, so his review can't destroy the servers like it did to Space Station 13.

[u/TheKnightIsForPlebs]

I watched the first half of his review and was like “right right okay yea I have 50 hours I know what I’m doing” then seth said okay that is just the surface. I was skeptical then when he showed us how to clone items, rep, shop keepers, and abuse the mechanics I was like damn I have only seen the tip of the iceburg huh. I wonder if any of that stuff will be patched

[u/Juandehierba]

Incoming 'hey hey people' reviees on Steam

[u/shaky2236]

Been expecting him to cover this for a while as its definitely his style of game. Hopefully it gets a few new players to the game!

[u/DinoTsar415]

"Overlay UI, turn it on. Don't know why it's not the default, it's virtually unplayable without it."

Imagine being this confidently wrong.

Not that the UI is bad or that people who play with it are wrong/worse, (they aren't) but hot damn QuD has some really great keyboard/classic roguelike controls. It's beyond silly to act like they aren't totally usable.

[u/Mafiapug]

I’ve been waiting for this for so long!